Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure of solid outcomes. Doing fast or slow, but sloppy and sloppier. Having strong ‘logic archetypes’ dominating airtime. Translation: the organization has pervasive ways of thinking and ‘logic’ that act as sacred cows nobody dares to touch. (Example: Six months of developing The Strategic Plan dictates short-term actions. In the last 10 years, no Strategic Plan has ever been achieved. Every year the cycle is repeated.) Repeating mistakes comes from either not learning or not unlearning fast. ‘Lessons learnt’ is a meeting ticking a box and not enough. Putting a premium value on intuitiveness, agility, entrepreneurial spirit and speed in a way that un-critically suggests that these are by definition great, no matter what, before one has even attempted to define what each concept really means. There is an ever-increasing desire for an extra supply of information on anything, even when the extra information never tends to change the course of things. Mistaking correlation with causality. Routinely assuming that if B follows A; A is the cause of B (try this with ‘great sales’ follows ‘intensive sales training’, not mentioning that the competitors screwed up their product launch). Banking too much on group discussions, group decisions, group accountability, and group thinking at the expense of individual reflection (by proxy: your calendar is full for months). Working most of the time on single-track logic, deterministic views, one way, no options, and lots of ‘therefore thinking’. [1] Particularly when this is not recognised or even denied. People equate ‘critical thinking’ with ‘common sense’. A variant: people say, ‘we are doing this already (critical thinking) all the time’. If you recognise one of them, dig deeper. Two, it’s becoming serious. Three, explore your doctor’s options. Four, Houston, you have a problem. Five or over, you need to stop and seriously look for ways to put that ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply. If ten out of ten, you are living in an artificial reality and at a high health risk. If you are successful, you are successful despite yourself. PS. Critical Thinking can be taught in the same way that your body can be re-shaped by going to a gym on a regular basis.

Learn more about Viral Change™ and its applications here [2]. Reach out to my team to learn more via [email protected].

We need to improve communication is not the same as, this is what we need to do to improve communication, and not the same as, this is what I am going to do to improve communication. In fact, these things are miles away from each other.

Life in organizations is often lived at the level of diagnosis. Oh God, how good we are at diagnosis. Sometimes people spend the day hopping from one meeting to another and providing an assessment, a view, a piece of diagnosis. Meeting one: we need to fix the supply issue. Meeting two: the product recall is a fiasco. Meeting three: we need to make sure we get the candidate right. With coffee in between. But who is going to at least start addressing the problem? You would have thought that somebody in the room. But what if the rest of the meeting participants are equally good at diagnosing but nobody really jumps in?

It may be that:

a. They don’t have the authority (but somebody has it somewhere)

b. They don’t need the authority but they don’t take accountability

c. They feel they need permission to take the accountability

And another hundred or so reasons.

The diagnosis life, without action, is exhausting.

The organization whose main core competence is admiring problems, is equally wearing.

It’s Ok if you don’t have a solution but you point to them. But if you start with ‘the problem is’, please don’t use a full stop after the description of the problem. The word ‘and’ is required.

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Dr Leandro Herrero is the CEO and Chief Organization Architect of The Chalfont Project ^[3], an international firm of organizational architects. He is the pioneer of Viral Change^TM, a people Mobilizing Platform, a methodology that delivers large scale behavioural and cultural change in organizations, which creates lasting capacity for changeability.

Dr Herrero is also an Executive Fellow at the Centre for the Future of Organization, Drucker School of Management. An international speaker, Dr Herrero is available for virtual speaking engagements ^[4] and can be reached at: The Chalfont Project ^[5].

 

Many organizations have a Risk Management function of some sort. Often scattered amongst different constituencies: manufacturing, engineering, R&D etc. It is also embedded in Quality Systems, such as ISO. Financial institutions, or indeed financial functions within the company, will have some form of system. However, the variations in depth and seriousness are enormous. From well-defined  ‘stress tests’ imposed on banks, to a vague list of potential risks with no more than lip service paid to actions, and one can find anything in between.

In my consulting experience, outside the most standardised areas of operations, in this area of Risk Management, I’ve seen more lip service and bad planning than the opposite.

I have argued in these Daily Thoughts that companies need to devise their own routine ‘stress tests’, beyond the financials, to understand their adaptability and indeed survival. But I’d like to take this further and suggest that these ‘stress tests’ need to be formalised in the leadership capabilities.

A good model is Netflix’s ‘Chaos Monkey’ ^[6]. This is how the successful video streaming company, with lots of avant-garde organizational and management structures, defines their ‘Chaos Monkey’: ‘A tool that randomly disables our production instances to make sure we can survive this common type of failure without any customer impact. The name comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in your data center (or cloud region) to randomly shoot down instances and chew through cables — all the while we continue serving our customers without interruption. By running Chaos Monkey in the middle of a business day, in a carefully monitored environment with engineers standing by to address any problems, we can still learn the lessons about the weaknesses of our system, and build automatic recovery mechanisms to deal with them. So next time an instance fails at 3 am on a Sunday, we won’t even notice’.

I think we should hire some of these Monkeys, with proper job descriptions, and give them the formal role of generating some chaos to test our abilities and resilience. And, as in my previous Daily Thought ^[7], I am not talking software or technology but in day-to-day business: hiring, product recalls, sudden acquisitions, etc.

Before you make the expected and easy joke that you do already have these Monkeys in your organization, and they are sitting in Marketing, or Sales, or HQ, or, indeed you have some in your own team creating havoc, I’d like you to consider the serious ‘Chaos Monkey’ that I am talking about.

OK, end of playing with words. Do consider formal simulations of how you will cope with unexpected issues, and do extend this to the ‘soft aspects’ of your management, not just the hard ones.

Instead of cables and servers ‘a la Netflix’, imagine processes, systems, your human capital. Do you really know how many people you have ‘at risk’ of leaving soon, and, if you do, do you really have a plan for that.

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Do you know your REAL organization?

 

 

The organization chart tells you who reports to whom but not much else. But, who is truly connected with whom?

For many years the need to understand formal and informal connections in organizations has been well understood.  Now, we have turned organizational network science into real practice: we uncover your networks with no pain, efficiently, fast and with absolute confidentiality.

People will easily tell you where they get the information they need from. Sometimes they do this through informal channels that are not entirely visible.  We can help you identify those channels.

 

 

 

3CXcan ^[8] provides a diagnosis of your formal and informal connections 

 

3CXcan ^[8] uses organizational network science software called Cfinder Algorithm, a tool for network cluster (community) detection, to give you a profound understanding of your internal networks. With this data you can built effective solutions for your organizational challenges. It is a diagnostic, not an action driven tool and it:

 

◦ Provides a picture: of the formal and informal organization and how effectively both operate.

◦ Reveals: organizational connections from strong to weak, to ineffective and broken connection.

◦ Gains insight: on the specific solutions and interventions required.

◦ Identifies: the individuals that will leverage change more effectively (ie champions).

 

Note:

• This process is totally anonymous.
• No names are ever revealed (unless there is a specific agreement)
• The data base of findings is erased soon after the debriefing has taken place

 

To find out what the results from this process look like and how it can help your business – find out more. ^[8]

For a free virtual consultation or a short walk through our demo – contact us now.; ^[5]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. ^[9] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. ‘The Flipping Point‘ ^[9] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like.  Read a recent review ^[10].

 

 

When managing an organization’s internal complexity, is a greater problem than managing the complexity of the environment.

When organizations grow, their systems and processes grow. When organizations grow, they are better able to address their complex, external environment. To react to that complex environment, the organization’s internal systems and processes become more complex. At some point, managing the internal complexity becomes a greater problem than managing the complexity of the environment. The airtime becomes internally consumed. The word customer is suddenly an inwards looking concept. The new, more complex internal systems attract even more internal complexity. The escalation is fast. 10 guys is a start-up. At 20, an entire HR department comes from nowhere. At 200, a new internal enterprise digital customer blah blah blah system is bought. From here on, the possibilities are endless.

I feel very strongly that these lenses explain a lot of self-inflicted problems. My solution: (1) stay in beta; (2) stay small or break up into small units [Dunbar’s number of 150? Bezos’s teams of one pizza feeding?); (3) Never try to reproduce in small what a big company is.

 

Autoimmune disease, organizations have a similar disease.

Autoimmune disease is when ‘the body produces antibodies that attack its own tissue, leading to the deterioration and sometimes the destruction of such tissue’. Organizations have a similar disease. Self-inflicted problems such as increasing complexity and ever-increasing decision-making processes. Give people on-the-spot permission to solve anything. Get 3 people, not 30, to make a decision in 3 days, not 30 days. Suppress the immune system with a high dose of common sense. In fact, listing self-inflicted problems is not that hard for any savvy manager.

Autoimmune disease. Listing self-inflicted problems is not that hard for any savvy manager. In fact, I ask clients to do this and create lists such as ‘problems that do not exist, but we seem to love to have’; ‘good problems to have’; ‘little problems with the voice of big problems’; etc.

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The Flipping Point ^[9] – Deprogramming Management. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!

Available from major online bookstores ^[11].

^[9]

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New webinar series launching this month.

Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management

Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us.   Leandro Herrero

To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.

All attendees receive a complimentary copy of The Flipping Point.

Webinar topics:

1. The myths of change.
2. Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
3. The myths of company culture.
4. The myths of management.
5. High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era

Request ^[12] more information about these webinars.

A while ago, my brand new iPhone was stolen at the airport, having left it behind on a table for just a few minutes. Clever thief, stupid me! I had just acquired the phone with a data package from my carrier as a bundle. I called my carrier. Since I had a business account, I expected that a handset replacement would be easy to obtain. I did not expect it to be free. I was prepared to pay whatever was required. When I called them and explained the circumstances, they told me repeatedly that ‘it was not their policy’ to replace a phone, even if I paid. The phone came with a package and that was that. One contract, one phone. No provision to have a second one, even if I paid.

His level of sympathy was zero. The ‘It’s our policy not to do that’ was repeated several times by the ‘customer services representative’ at the beginning of each of his sentences, no matter what. When I challenged him that I needed help, not a lecture on their policies, he suggested that I try their competitor! Literally. Because ‘it was their policy not to replace a handset’, of course. Today, I am with another carrier.

But I didn’t go to their competitor at the time, because I decided to call Apple directly. A human being with a Californian accent (I was in the UK) was at the other end in less than a minute, compared with the close to five of my previous experience. I explained the incident in the airport, and how bad (stupid?) I felt. The voice at the other end started to engage with me in a conversation about how dreadful it was to have your phone stolen, how bad one feels, and how having a hard time on this is the last thing one wants on a busy day. And he went as far as saying, ‘I feel sorry for you’. I could not believe it. There was a human being with empathy for my little troubles at the other end of the line and he was truly sympathetic and kind. Had he tried to sell me a fridge I would have agreed. But I bought a new iPhone from him. Before he went off, we chatted about the weather in California and the UK.

In the last weeks, I have tried to book a hotel for a family weekend trip to Ireland. The hotel reservation person told me that, for that particular weekend, they had a policy of not accepting less than 2 nights. I only needed one. I expressed my surprise. I confess I have not encountered this before. ‘Sorry Sir, it is our policy that during these busy weekends, we don’t book for less than 2 days’. I protested, and they suggested that I should write to the manager. So I did. Guess what the manger’s email said?   That ‘it’s our policy’ etc.  I did email the general manager to test if he hired his staff from Robots Anonymous. His reply came with a familiar statement: ‘It’s our policy that’, etc.

These examples of self-centred-not-customer-services are not uncommon. People who are supposed to serve you, don’t listen to you and show zero interested in serving. None of these people at that hotel spontaneously suggested any alternatives to me. But I know a bit more about policies now. And I still think an Apple fridge is a good idea.

A meeting room without a flipchart is decaffeinated coffee. The absence of a flipchart insinuates possibly lots of talking, perhaps a conference or video call, but not necessarily the rolling up of sleeves and ‘working on something’. The flipchart implies brainstorming, getting things out in the open, a licence to throw up ideas and the possibility of capturing them.

Ah! Capturing! These ideas become captive once on the flipchart. Eventually complex thoughts will be de-constructed into bullet point lines. Bullet point lines will grow in numbers and a second sheet will be required. Perhaps a third. Then something magic will happen in all those brains in the room. Magic because for some reasons it comes in sync:  Prioritize! Prioritization is merciless murder. ‘We need to get it down to the key three, or the key five if we are generous’.

(I sometimes have this mental picture of people waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain with The Tablet announcing: “I’ve got 10 commandments’, and the Jews shout back ‘Prioritize!’, ‘Give us the top three!’).

Flipcharts will be wallpaper by now. People feel good with all these white sheets around, full of colours, letters, circles, arrows, bullet. It means productivity, offspring, worth, capacity, good brains, progress.  Occasionally, an extra-terrestrial invasion of yellow post-its land on the flipcharts by the hand and command of the Categorization Squad. The take-over converts the multi-coloured sheets into tall, white buildings with lots of little yellow windows. The room becomes a city full of buildings of the same size, all next to each other. The meeting room is now a Disney-coloured supermarket of captive ideas.

But now it’s time to debrief, to stand up and tell what the flipchart says. Perhaps one of the sheets survives and will be taken away in a briefcase to new territories, uncomfortably folded for travelling. For the rest, left behind, death is approaching. Prolonged agony at first, then they will remain piled together, one on top of the other, perhaps for months. All mixed up. Those financial projection sheets laying together with the sheets full of circles and arrows from the previous session with the marketing visitors, and these themselves beneath a sheet from an obscure brainstorming session on where to build a plant, and all of these sheets rest on top of a list of pristinely described, never achieved, completely forgotten meeting objectives.

The flipchart is the largest corporate graveyard of ideas. Their individual biographies are the Lost Scrolls of corporate memory.

The degree of comfort in discovering the roots of things, cannot be taken as proof of the truth. The best we can do, and must do, is to exercise critical thinking and mental rigour, to get as close as possible to what may look like ‘the causes’. Finding culprits is easy. It is more complicated to prove that they are solely responsible for the situation.

‘Root Cause Analysis’  is common in manufacturing processes where some disciplines in this area has been established for a long time. It’s also very present in Health and Safety systems. It is far less explicit in other managerial processes in organizations, where you sometimes have the impression that people are ‘playing the music’ without being very serious in the search for ‘causes’, most likely to be the causes of a failure.

I go back all the time to the need for ‘critical thinking’. And this is a discipline, a kind of mental gym, in great part trying to avoid our mental traps. The mind tricks us all the time, and is particularly good at providing comfort. It makes it easy to rationalise and justify our decisions. As an example, it tries to avoid ‘cognitive dissonance’: ‘I missed the train, I’ll be late to the concert, never mind, the first part was not that important’. Which is far more palatable than ‘What a shame, I missed the train, how stupid, I did not get the full concert’.

Most critical thinking looks like simple A,B,C on paper, but is consistently practised badly. The most obvious example is the constant mistake of mixing up causes and correlations. In Root Cause Analysis, when exercised by not very disciplined people, I have seen many times how easy it is to find correlations and then give up on rigorous thinking, soon ending in ‘having found the cause or causes’. Comfort is high, the truth slim.

Psychoanalysis is very good at digging into childhood to find ‘the causes’ of adult problems. And causes were found, indeed. Comfort was provided to some extent, because ‘having an explanation’ is in itself a good anxiolytic, regardless of whether the explanation is solid or not. Solidity in psychoanalysis was high in its internal consistency (the system of psychoanalytic thinking was once described as one of those worms that one can cut in pieces and the pieces will still move) but not in its validity.  In fact, psychoanalysis was born out of Freud’s first thought, that bringing unconscious problems to life (conscious) would be enough to produce ‘the cure’. It was not. It did not work with far more complicated situations, which at that time were called ‘neurosis, a term now buried by modern Psychiatry.  The digging into the past via dreams and the entire psychoanalytic approach was then born. That new ‘psychoanalytic method’  was the result of the need to create a more sophisticated system of cure. And still didn’t cure much, but this is a story for another day.

Digging, collecting data, finding causes, is necessary. It must be applied in management. It should be a standard reflection for leadership. But one has to remain restless in front of ‘obvious causes’ and always bring a healthy critical approach. Comfort is easy; the truth is slightly more complicated.

We spend too much time seeking predictable answers. They are not necessarily bad. If I work with Peter, Paul and Mary on a regular basis, my mind has a good idea of what Peter, Paul or Mary would say to my difficult question. Not that this has little value. On the contrary, Peter is a good brain, Paul has a wealth of experience and Mary is a good critical thinker.

But, if I really need a breakthrough in my own thinking, view of the world, or my preconceived plans on how to address this big issue in front, I should try unpredictable answers. That rules out Peter, Paul and Mary. Also your close team, people you know well, friends.

Unpredictable answers are more likely to come from people you don’t know that well, perhaps you have some ties (‘weak ties’ it’s called in social sciences), perhaps you have been vaguely in touch. Or serious consultants who are prepared to tell you the truth, not to agree directly with what you think. (Come on, find them!)

You should make a list of your normal, good, reliable, safe, predictable connections and then rule out anybody on that list. Unless there is somebody in that list who, although you may know well, truly ‘thinks differently’.

Then make a list of more unlikely, unusual or possibly vague connections. This list may contain people from an opposite part of the company, from another company, most powerful even, from another industry sector. Tap into that intellectual capital.

The quest for innovation, small i or big I, starts from the unpredictability of things. Most of the time we surround ourselves with predictable ones. Just by injecting small doses of unpredictability (read: pick up the phone and call that guy you met a year ago at a kid’s school match, who is a head of Sales in A industry sector, whilst you work in B), those that may feel a bit weird (sure, you do the non-weird ones every day) will stimulate you to try again and again.

Then, it will become as normal as talking to your own (more predictable) team.

Innovation and renewal requires your windows open to the world. Plenty of organizations out there are experimenting with models, far more than just a few years ago. Some models, such as holacracy ^[13], for example, are a ‘paradigm shift’, to use a piece of jargon. Big things, big time. Other experimentations are small(er), less risky and less likely to make headlines.

Everywhere people are trying to answer a nagging question. It’s not even a question in the first place. It’s a recurrent nagging feeling, a statement of hope, an expression of mild to big frustration: ‘Surely, there must be a better way”.  A better way of being organised, of getting people on board, or being successful, of driving this machinery called ‘the company’.

In this quest, some people close their eyes and will call a Big Consulting Group which will come along with pre-cooked answers, even before they hear the questions. The Answers Traders are very good at what they do.

Other people will struggle and look for ideas, examples, inspirations, models. The temptation is to copy and install, as you would install a piece of software. Most models are not fully transferable. If you want to be exactly as Google, you’d better apply for a job there.

The trick is to steal a bit, copy, imagine, experiment, observe. Buy some ingredients from the Open Supermarket of Cool Ideas, but do your own cooking.

Be patient, but not too much. Be reasonable, but not too much.

As leader, create an environment where it’s ok to experiment. Don’t look for the Big Universal Solution.

Steal, try, experiment.

So you have The Process and The Outcome dating. You would have thought that they are having a good time. Maybe. What kind of relationship do they have?

These are your available combinations

Model 1. The Process is the key; the outcome is secondary. This is a type of journey of experiential activity. Be clear about this. If you are serious, you need to accept unpredictable and even unwanted outcomes. Enjoy the process, nothing wrong with this. Journeys are good. To those asking you for a particular outcome, say you don’t know. The ‘how we do it’ matters to you more. Be brave and say so.

Model 2. The Outcome is king; the process is there to produce an outcome. OK. Clear. So, here, any process is a good process as long as it gives me the outcome. Now review all your processes and detach yourself from any love you may have for any of them. They don’t matter in themselves anymore. As long as you get the outcome, you should be happy. So, stop nagging about the process.

Model 3. Both Process and Outcome are equally important. Wow! Then you’d better craft the connection very well. If it’s a marriage of equals, it’s a marriage of equals, not one more equal than the other. Note: in this type of ‘I want this’, one starts very equal but soon often discovers that you care more abut one than the other. As soon as you realise this, leave model 3, and jump to any other or you’ll be very dishonest in the least and, at worse, kidding yourself, and never reaching expectations on top of it. Never Satisfied Land is a frequent destination of this model.

Model 4. Both Process and Outcome have not been weighted. They are just there. Connection is assumed. In summary you have a pretty casual view of things and a very loose approach to life. Congratulations, you have qualified for a long holiday. Goodbye.

The simplicity of the above combinations is powerful. Most people ‘want everything’: a good process, a good outcome. These people assume that the word ‘good’ miraculously links both. But it doesn’t. It is very difficult (I repeat, very) to craft the perfect connection between both.

Saint Randomness also intervenes here. Many good outcomes seem to come sometimes from pretty lazy processes. Also, pristine processes may deliver great garbage.

Make sure you apply critical thinking to Your Plan. Make sure you know where your heart is. The Outcome Junkies, will do anything in order to achieve a KPI. That may include murder. The Process Junkies, love processes so much that they marry them at any cost as well.

The leader’s role assumes a pre-existing human condition. It’s called a functioning brain preferably attached to a heart. Use your pre-existing human condition fully. Don’t kid yourself. Choose.

I explained to a client the logic and principles of the Viral Change™ Platform. I did not want to sell Viral Change ™. I explained the logic. The client said ‘it makes sense’, with a tone closer to an ‘alas, sometimes that makes sense’. Viral Change™ was sold, because it made sense amongst other things that don’t.

I have visited a physician for a second opinion and she explained her logic. All the pieces of that logic came down, one after another, in an unpretentious, unassuming, manner, in an unpretentious, unassuming hospital that is the leader in the world in its specialty. In the end, she made sense where others had given me facts and figures and statements that were surely good but that did not make sense when all put together. She made sense.

A client has taken time to explain to his people what is behind a paraphernalia of corporate jargon and an information tsunami, which had been presented to them with great fanfare, and at huge communications agency cost. He made sense of it all, he provided the meaning and, more importantly, the pointers for the meaning, so people could make sense of it themselves.

‘It makes sense’ is a beautiful epiphany of the mind, suddenly grasping the meaning, providing comfort, elevating the discussion to a human (not word permutation) level.

Sense making is precious territory. You can’t fabricate it. But, if you see it, or experience it, or provide it, you are at serious trust level, and, as such, at a high human level of interaction with your fellow travellers.

Modern and not so modern ‘social movements’ with or a without business propositions are portrayed as a concerted and positioned philosophy first, from which then, the ‘movement’ (and the business) takes shape. Translation: philosophy first, movement and practicalities, and business follow.

Take Uber; democratization of transportation in cities, competing with old fashioned taxi monopolies, disruption of a business model supported by technology. So the story reads.

Zipcar. Cars waiting for you in dedicated places, you rent by the hour, you return the car. Democratization of transport again, technology enabled do-it-yourself going from A to B by car without owning it. Disruptive model, changing the world of personal travel.

The so-called ‘sharing economy’ is another example. You own less and less and share more and more, from lawn mowers to anything. This is less consumerism, greater sustainability. Great.

Airbnb. Adios hotels; book a room, an apartment, a villa, anywhere. More disruption of the model. New concept and new philosophy embraced by thousands of followers.

All these are good examples of disruptive business models and, very often, are portrayed as ‘philosophy’, a matter of principles, an indication of the change in the world, a new lens, a clever and new worldview. Again, philosophy first and then the translation.

Nothing further from the truth. Most of these ‘disruptions’ were born out of a necessity with little philosophical, worldview, of the type ‘this will change the world for good’. Airbnb’s original members struggled to pay the rent and offered rooms. How’s that for a ‘change the world philosophy’? Uber, often portrayed as the mother of all evils (for taxi companies in cities, that is) and ‘sweatshops on wheels’, has created a lot of personal freedom (in hours to work, for example) and work flexibility. The ‘I am my own boss’ philosophy (‘don’t you see this is the thing that new generations want?’) plus ‘anything is possible with digital’(apps), plus creative or not so creative disruption came later.

The real stories are more prosaic than the portrayed philosophies in a disruptive world. Incidentally, all of them are more or less represented as enabled by incredible disruptive technologies, when technology in most of them is not really a big deal.

These examples are a mere replication of the way we shape our lives. We think that we have a theory first and then ‘we put it into practice’. The theory is the clever bit, or the romantic, or the save-the-world bit. But most of the time, we have practices first and then we extract a theory that explains them.

My experience with entrepreneurs to whom we attribute visionary, change the world philosophies, is that they are the first to be surprised about the attribution. Most want to solve a problem. Period. Not to change the world. This being said, many also love the post-hoc flattering attribution of Socratic and semi-messianic visions.

 

A few years ago, the BBC broadcast a series called ‘How we built Britain’, presented by the veteran David Dimbleby. In the episode dedicated to the Victorians, he said something, almost in passing, which has stuck in my mind since: ‘For every problem, the Victorians had a building’. Growing local government? OK, here we are, big City Halls (Manchester, Leeds… ) Actually, Manchester thought of itself as the new Florence. Mental illness? Sure, the big asylums are built in the form of ‘mini-towns’ (all services included) which the great Canadian sociologist, Erving Goffman (1922-1982), would call ‘Total Institutions’. Mass transportation? No problem, railways and their cathedral-like train stations appear. Add also big churches, big shopping malls (probably not called this) and big leisure centres. ‘The building’ was the answer. And the bigger, the better.

‘Management’ is the ‘Victorian Architecture’ of the modern organization. For every problem we create a structure: a new business unit, a new franchise, a new committee, a new task force, a new merger of A and B, a new management team, a restructuring, a new structural or functional conceptual building as ‘the answer’. We have become very good at providing structural solutions to problems that may, for example, require behavioural rather than structural answers. A typical scenario is amalgamating A and B into C because A and B do not talk to each other. We create a new building C, but people still are not talking to each other. (Mind you, we have saved a Sr VP salary).

The Big Ones of the consulting industry have sold us ‘(re)structure’ as the answer to everything. In part because Organization Chart Permutations are an easy thing to do.  If you want to be seen doing something, change the structure. Small detail, ‘the building‘ may not be the answer. In fact, ‘the new building’ may be a big distraction and create an illusion of ‘problem solved’ and control.

I am bound to say this because of my background and my own work, but, for every managerial problem, we should look first for a behavioural answer. It’s a good bet.

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We’ve had a great response to the 50% off offer on our Mobilize Masterclass ^[14]!  The offer ends this Sunday – if you’re interested but haven’t contacted us yet, then don’t hesitate, please email us now for your promotional code: [email protected] ^[15].

‘Prioritize’ is a word that I particularly dislike because it is overused and  misused in a terrible way. I have seen many people making sophisticated priority lists, grounded in a sound and elaborate process to then kill the rigour at the last minute by choosing the actions that seem more amenable or, shall we say, that we can control. Clean and simple, but not terribly rigorous.

The logic of focusing on the things that one can control is inescapable. But there is no logic in sweeping the things that one cannot control, and that may be the real core of the problem, under the carpet. Just because I, as leader, can control my organization chart, play musical chairs, and move people around, does not mean that reorganizing is an automatic priority.

‘Prioritize’ as a term, has two meanings: (1) arrange or do something in order of priority and (2) declare something to be more important than another. People follow more or less both, but, as a client put it recently, we seem to always prioritize in a way that everything becomes No 1! Besides the funny comment, there is enormous truth here. For something to become No 1, something else will have to become 2 or 3. We sometimes seem to have a few number 1’s competing with each other.

In Decision Analysis, there is a principle called ‘preference independence’. It means that if you have A, B, and C as options, you can’t chose one such as ‘B with a little bit of C’. If you really like ‘B with a little bit of C’, this is your D option!  In our cruder, day-to-day prioritization, when we don’t use a decision analysis tool other than our brains, we need to learn the ‘preference independence’ principle as well. We need to be better at refining the options before rushing to priorities.

And we need to apply some principles of critical thinking as well, so that, particularly in a group situation, we don’t end up with the classical basket of ‘things that we can’t control’ without actually challenging ourselves on the truth of that category.  Are these really things that we definitely cannot control? You will be surprised how the discipline of the questioning can eventually decrease the size of that basket.

In my experience, managers consistently and grossly underestimate the power they have to implement things. That is why the standard prioritization process, as generally used, is poorer than it should be. The easy ‘lets pick up one or two’ has become a default outcome of many priority exercises. Often those ‘one or two’ were already (and suspiciously) the front runners before the priority setting process. ‘Let’s prioritize’ and ‘Let’s choose the usual suspects’ are two different things.

What type are you?

How our mental models work is part of the Minimal Introspection, something we tend to overlook, because we have not too much time to introspect.

With practice, perhaps experience, perhaps maturity, perhaps …life, I don’t know, people get better at ‘the heuristics of the world’. Apologies for the pomp. This is, how to avoid using all possible mental algorithms, have all possible data, and look at all possible choices, before making a decision.

The brain can’t compete with a superfast computer in looking at all possibilities. Humans were created unfinished, imperfect, with a great brain, which is great precisely because it’s not completely algorithmic, completely able to explore all avenues, all the time (unless you suffer from some particular mental illness).

Heuristics bypasses ‘all the data’, works with the available and possible, and jumps in. The liability is called risk. Risk of getting it wrong. But the alternative is the full exploration of all data and all possibilities. This is slow death.

So whilst some people may be naturally better than others at taking risks and making imperfect decisions with imperfect data, and win because of that, this can be learn. As always, by practicing.

• A fifth focus group may not give you more insights than the already accumulated by four focus groups, so don’t do it.
• Asking for more and more market research reassurance may give reassurances but not a good market strategy. Go.
• Trial and error today is better than non-error in twenty years.

So, yes, “There are two types of people in the world: those who can extrapolate from incomplete data sets”

It’s terrifying.

You are in front of an inquisitorial crowd, maybe your own people, and have to say, I don’t know.

Don’t leave it like this. It is:

1. I don’t know but I will find out
2. I don’t know yet
3. I don’t know, do you know?
4. I don’t know, who do you think can answer it?
5. I don’t know. And I suspect you don’t know either. Shall we find out?

I am very fond of number 5.

The worse thing is to make it up. I see that every day. People feel compelled to say, to intervene, to give the answer. Any answer. We are so rich in answers and so poor in questions.

I navigate in a human capital (consulting)  territory (culture, change, leadership, design) in which there seems to be more experts than  people in the payroll. So, I see  lots of experts who would not challenge a Net Present Value coming from Finance but who have erected themselves as masters of behavioural and cultural change. Oh well.

There is an  old saying in Taoism: ‘To know that one does not know is best. To not know, but to believe that one knows, is a disease”.

That is why I thing many people in organizations don’t look too well

 

Socrates said. Or Plato said Socrates said. Socrates never wrote a word. He did not trust them. They were the left overs of thinking.

Socrates would not survive any of our corporate brainstorms, or post-it management on walls, or prioritization exercises, or the net-net- or the bottom line, or the executive summary, or the take home.

We run largely anti Socratic organizations where the thought of letting our destinations be decided by the winds of our discussions would be simply terrifying. We are so eager to close the argument and allocate an action that short-cutting reflection is almost a badge of honour.

Fortunately those winds of discussion take place in corridors, canteens, and coffee machine corners,. They act as a cognitive pressure cooker valves, open to decompress some trains of thought that could not see the light otherwise. The informal organization provides the oxygen. The formal organization the structure and one or two straight jackets.

In conferences, the good discussion takes place at the breaks. Running a conference ( and perhaps running the entire company) as a long-long coffee break makes a lot of sense.

Yet, the trick for productive conversations, with oxygen, and the ‘letting of our destination being decided by the winds of our discussion’, maybe simple. Declare the spaces: for the next 45 minutes we will meander unapologetically with no clear harbour in mind; let’s us sail and see, maybe smell, certainly hear each other. And, in the next 45 minutes we will discuss X in order to make a decision on how to fix Y, which will be decided before we all go home.

Borders. High fences make good neighbours. Fenced spaces.

Don’t forget Socrates.

Wisdom Nomads go form meeting to meeting. ‘We need to make sure that’, ‘we have to know how this fits with’, ‘we have to ask if’, ‘I am concerned about’, usually mean absolutely nothing. Spot those Nomadic Wisdom Distributors, and do something for your managerial wellbeing.

He is just making a statement of wisdom for distribution around the table. He has just sent a message of prudence and warning to others, by definition, and by attribution, less prudent than him. He will leave the room and do nothing. He will leave the meeting on the hour (‘sorry, I have a 4 o’clock’, I’ll catch up with you later, Peter’, said to the organiser, eye to eye, ignoring everybody else) because he is very important, and his pieces of wisdom starting with ‘we need to make sure that’ and ‘we need to be careful that’, and ‘I am concerned about’, are needed in other 2 or 3 meetings that day. Or the ski will fall.

Those recurrent and predictable pearls of wisdom distributed around the room are seldom challenged. Why would you? It’s hard to disagree. So everybody nods their heads acknowledging the vital contribution.

These nomadic managers spend their day going from tent to tent contributing with their ‘we need to make sure that’, and ‘we need to be careful about’. They also arrive slightly late to each meeting; ‘sorry I am late, I was just in a meeting with X, usually an important one with a big name. These people bring zero value to the enterprise whilst growing an hypertrophic ego continuously reinforced  by nobody calling it out. The trouble is that if they are relatively senior, all they are doing is to slow down the discussion, the advancement of an idea, or the progression towards a resolution.

They are bad news. And this tribe is huge. It’s the tribe of the Very Important, High Wisdom Priesthood. And its sister Congregation of the Very Concerned Fellows. They perform their rituals day to day, relentlessly. And rituals are hard to break.

You’d be surprised how much you can advance, and do,  and get done, by not inviting these priests. But if you have them inside your own tent, start the breaking of the ritual. ‘We need to make sure we talk to John, and be careful we don’t’ can be followed by ‘sure, you  have just got yourself a job, you talk to John and you are in charge of X so we are that careful’. Similarly, ‘I am concerned that’ needs to be followed by ‘let’s do something about your concern, Mary, why don’t you tackle that issue for us, so that you are not concerned anymore?’

These people  will become busy, actually doing something, and you will be doing an immense favour to other tents as well.

Allow yourself to be a bit inefficient

Reinvent some wheels from time to time

Don’t always reuse the same presentation

Don’t cut and paste from an original document

Change routines once a month

Don’t repeat a workshop twice in the same conference

Same joke only allowed after six months

Inject a percentage of new process in an old process

All teams must have a sell-by-date at which point they will dissolve themselves

Don’t repeat the same presentation to employees in different places

Be irritating by asking ‘can we do this in different way?’

Leave routines for going the gym

Don’t use the same route to drive to work every day

Reinvent that wheel

Allow yourself a dose of inefficiency to discover new possibilities and being extremely effective. Effectiveness has to do with success, solutions, possibilities perhaps not planned, emergent. You can’t solve organizational and business problems with an army of very efficient people.

Efficiency has to do with no waste and repetition. Some things need to be very efficient, like a car.  Like some manufacturing processes. Raising teenagers however has to be effective and allow for a high dose of inefficiency in terms of time and effort spent.

Be courageous and say, actually, I am going to reinvent the wheel.

Be bold and ask, are we very efficient or very effective?

Ditto, do we have any slack in the system? Any buffer? Any marvellously inefficient pockets?

You may drive some people mad. That’s a good sign.

Some wheels are in desperate need of reinvention.

Go for it.

Our managerial training and praxis has been quite successful at making us guilty of not focusing enough on a task or topic. Focus, focus, focus, has been the mantra of multiple managerial recipes, entire manuals of strategy, and overpaid coaching sessions.

Who could deny its logic? Well, some wild people who think we may have too much logic, too early.  ‘Tell them to focus on one thing, the one, the one that will make a difference’, the Management Oracle advises. ‘Prioritize the top 3. Give me the one thing. Focus, for goodness sake!’

Out of guilt of not focusing, and  out of the external demand to focus, one thing surely happens: we focus. Which may mean missing a hell of a lot of things by surrendering  too soon to the magnetic, in front of me, thing I can do and ‘focus on’.

The problem is not that we need to focus – let’s agree to agree – but that we don’t prepare ourselves for ‘it’, and then we uncritically hook with whatever moves in front of us.

Leonard Mlodinow’ book ‘Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World’ is a shot of fresh air. A serious theoretical physicist, enters the cognitive territory and the airport bookshelves.  Amongst other things,  he encourages us (my paraphrasing) to look at our states of mind ‘before the focus’. Steven Poole’s review in The Guardian says it nicely:

It turns out that we might approach problems more creatively if our executive, conscious brain is exhausted from having focused on lots of boring choices: so a few hours doing your accounts might help you write a better sonnet afterwards. Alternatively, if you find the world to be a fuzzy place in the mornings due to sleep inertia, which Mlodinow charmingly admits is true of him (“in my morning stupor I have done things like crack an egg into the sink and then start to fry the shell”), you will do your best writing soon after waking up.

I have plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this. But I will go beyond that. Very creative minds are often not completely focused on the creation itself ‘before it’. It may look like ‘preparing your mind’ for what comes next by not focusing on that too much. I love Werner Herzog’s Masterclass on film making in the fabulous masterclass.com. He spends a fair bit of his intro explaining how before starting the big day, first day of filming, he spends hours and hours listening to classical music, which will have nothing to do with the script of the movie. So he is preparing himself for the big day by not preparing for the big day. In fact, in the early chapters of that masterclass, he seems completely carried away reading some Nordic poems and asking the learner/user to reflect and digest, almost making you feel for a second that you have clicked into the wrong class.

I have no MRI data, or cognitive sciences studies to show,  but I am convinced that exploring completely different worlds, ‘alien to the task’, focus then comes out  much better.

We are becoming poor readers. The new generations are small screen generations. On the face of it, these are very focused.  But the brain has not learnt well how to distinguish noise and signal. We fall in love for the signal and we want to apply the learning straight away to something, or we will feel guilty of un-focusing and non-delivering. We may just have to learn to give our brains a break by abandoning the push for the small here and now, the quick googling as ‘re-search’ (that is, search twice in Google) and perhaps allowing our minds to wander more before the end of wandering.

I wish these Daily Thoughts did a bit of that magic by transporting you somewhere else for a quick stop before you start your ‘day focusing’. Nothing would make me happier.